Tracking Islamophobia in the Media

When Bill O’Reilly told Whoopi Goldberg that we have a “Muslim problem,” which she corrected as a “terrorist problem,” he attributed the problem to the fact that Muslim countries, like Pakistan, aren’t collaborating with us to catch the bad guys. He said that Pakistani Madrasas are basically camps where kids as young as 4 or 5 learn “Jihad.” O’Reilly couldn’t be more factually incorrect in his definition of Madrasas because these are simply schools where poor kids who can’t afford real education can at least learn to recite the Quran. It is strange he says Pakistan is not collaborating with the U.S. Maybe he arrogantly expects it to open its doors for our forces to invade it just we did in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pakistani citizens have already paid the price of their government’s collaboration with the U.S. in its global war on terror: More than 6000 have been killed both by our US bombs and by the radicals lashing out at Pakistan for allying itself with the U.S. O’Reilly further ignores the underlying reasons why this terrorism problem happened in the first place. The unaddressed grievances that caused it to happen are clearly detailed below in the 9-11 Commission Report. The investigations show the clash with these Muslim terrorists is rooted in our policies and not really about civilizations or religious values, as some would like us to believe.

These grievances which continue to go unaddressed are further complicating our fight on terror as clearly stated by General David Petraeus in a closed Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in March 2010:

O’Reilly still defends his ignorant views that there isn’t much violence or bullying of Muslim kids leaning on statistics that show more hate crimes against Jews. He and Whoopi neglect to put these stats in context because obviously the Jewish population is bigger than the Muslim one. But the hatred of Muslims in more overtly expressed publicly on the streets, on TV and even endorsed by many politicians, including Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich, who equates Muslims with Nazis! O’Reilly once again stated that 90% of terrorists are Muslims. Meanwhile, the FBI Database numbers below indicate otherwise: